ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The Iraqi government is facing multiple challenges as the country transitions from a costly war with the Islamic State (ISIS) to normalcy, and human trafficking is a prevalent problem the country is trying to crack down on.
“Iraq poses a complex TiP [trafficking in persons] problem as trafficking happens before and during crisis situations and across the borders,” Placido Silipigni, the head of Iraq’s Migration Management Unit at the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said in a report published on Friday, referring to the humanitarian crisis that erupted after the emergence of ISIS in the country.
Thousands of civilians fled for their lives when the jihadist group swept through northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, forcing many to take shelter in camps across the Kurdistan Region. The influx of internally displaced people (IDPs) and refugees fleeing the war in Syria led to a humanitarian crisis in the Region which gave rise to social ills in these displacement centers, notably human trafficking.
Human trafficking has been identified by IOM as a crime that includes sexual exploitation, forced labor, the enslavement of women and girls by members of armed groups, and the use of trafficked children as soldiers and street beggars.
The Iraqi constitution prohibits these malpractices.
SEED is a charity foundation in Erbil which works to empower women and with survivors of violence. It recently released a report on human trafficking in the Kurdistan Region.
Conservatively an estimated 174,000 victims of trafficking exist in Iraq – a country characterized by the United States Department of State’s 2018 Trafficking in Persons Report as both a source and destination for TiP.
There are different forms of human trafficking in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region including commercial sexual exploitation, forced prostitution, forced labor, forced or early marriage, organ trafficking, and the recruitment of children for armed conflict, the report stated.
The report also highlights disputed areas claimed by both the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and federal government as transit points exploited by human traffickers.
Its findings show miscellaneous groups of people experiencing or vulnerable to human trafficking, including migrant workers, locals, IDPs, refugees, children, and ISIS captives.
The IOM has recently introduced a ‘community policing’ approach to tackle human trafficking in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region.
The program, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, aims to “contribute to enhanced security and stability in Iraq by facilitating dialogue between communities and law enforcement actors through Community Policing Forums (CPF) in communities affected by conflict and displacement.”
Through this kind of community engagement, the IOM hopes to better ‘identify and prevent’ cases of human trafficking in Iraq. The IOM has been organizing training sessions for Iraqi and Kurdish prosecutors, investigative judges and law enforcement officers in Erbil and Baghdad on mainstreaming community policing in an attempt to help regional and federal governments resolve the issue of human trafficking in the country.
According to the KRG Ministry of Labor, 3,843 migrant workers entered the Kurdistan Region and subsequently obtained residency permits in 2017, and another 1,913 in the first nine months of 2018. The Kurdistan Region is also home to nearly 1.5 million IDPs and Syrian refugees who fled the scourge of war with ISIS to take shelter in the region.
The KRG recognizes migrant workers experiencing or being vulnerable to human trafficking in the region.
Lt. Col. Dara Farouq is the head of Counter Trafficking Directorate in the Kurdistan Region and attended a recent training session in Erbil.
“The training helped us to learn new methods of investigation, as we currently have a lot of cases related to foreign migrant workers that need these methods to be applied to rescue the victims of trafficking and bring the perpetrators to justice," he said in the report.